Cumulative update!

On Saturday, Armin let me drive his business's front-loader. He says it's fun as long as you don't have to do it every day. It has four wheel steering, so you can actually turn on a dime, which seems like it would take a lot of getting used to. Later on, we drove to Cella to watch Ulf and Peter play in some band or another, and I did 100mph on the Autobahn. (I had never driven on the Autobahn before.) People drive incredibly fast in the left lane, and apparently it's quite common to see how fast your car can go; Armin tells me that when he was in his 20s he did over 255km/h, passing a Porsche.

This weekend we're heading for Prague; we were supposed to go last weekend, but Armin had dental work done on Thursday and was blasted half out of his mind on painkillers. We're taking his RV, so we're totally free and our only expense is diesel. An RV is a pretty cool idea, when you think about it; all you need is gas money, a map, and a Mettwurst the size of a shampoo bottle. (Armin happened to have one of these right next to the door, like a fire extinguisher or something; it's probably weeks' worth of food.)

I finished translating two web sites at work, now I'll probably spend the rest of the internship (one week) on this assignment to translate all the strings in some program to English. I have a special glossary for it and everything, but it's still pretty rough. Huge, too; I'll get a lot of it done, but probably not everything.

Oh, and my mom's coming up on the 19th, and then we're flying back on the same plane.

Huge milestone!!!!!

Emilie said "Scheiße" last night!

=D

It's work!!!

I finally have a job! I'm translating the web site for the company. And then some other things. Funny story, actually - the only thing that got me to go to work yesterday was the idea to translate the web site. I get there with my over-the-top dictionary, which is the size and weight of a medieval drawbridge, and as it turns out they had already decided yesterday that I should translate the web site, since I had nothing to do.

Instead of quitting that day, I guess I'll be working there for at least the next four weeks. So, figuring I'd make myself at home, I installed WinAMP and stuff on the computer, got the sound to work (after a few visits to those unsavory driver websites and troubleshooting message boards), and on Monday I'll be there at 9am, with my DVDs of music and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. This will also be a great time to catch the rebroadcast of the previous day's edition of the Alex Jones Show.

And the aptly named, Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Company

Not a whole lot has happened lately, largely in part due to the job. The job, by the way, has been the most uneventful part of all. I have literally nothing to do. My existence goes wholly unnoticed, and reality is totally uninfluenced by my actions. It's like The Sixth Sense. So, I spend my days taking advantage of the company's internet connection (must be a T1 or something, I got firefox at 128kB/sec, which is way better than what I get at home, which is 56k) and free coffee (Kondens Milch is great, it's 7.5% fat and makes coffee taste awesome). Originally I felt angry and guilty about being useless, and I wanted to quit and work for Armin instead, but I'm starting to get used to it. I mean, I learned a ton about phonetics today (on Wikipedia - did you know that English is the only language that has r-colored schwa in standard varieties?), read a bunch of news articles (I've got my Google News layout totally setup now), checked email aggressively.

On Saturday I went out to Hanover with Patrick, who stayed at our house back in 2001 with a friend, for a week or something. He bought me a bunch of preposterous drinks (a Piña Colada in Germany is about six euro, at least at the one American bar & grill we went to - only a minority of Germans have ever supported the euro, but they adopted it anyway), and we also went to an American diner and had awesome burgers. We'll probably go out again in the future (once his girlfriend is back in town) and see a movie or something.

Hm, I drank all my water

I'm not posting this from work. And if you think otherwise, good luck trying to prove it.

More internet cafés

Angela took me to a nice one in Hildesheim, which is where I currently am. I have 10 minutes left, unless I break this 5€ bill. Hm, I've always wanted to use this € key, but now that I have it doesn't look that great. Not typeset well, doesn't fit with the numbers. Wait... is it €5?

Anyway, I might be coming here more often, because (a) it's fast, which I miss, and (b) AOL at home costs a fortune. German internet prices are, apparently, outrageous. Or maybe it's just AOL. They don't even have a monthly fee; they buy a certain number of hours a month, and then to go over that it's a small Heavy Hourly Rate.

Armin's been on a fishing trip extravaganza in Norway since last weekend. He comes back tomorrow morning. I might be in trouble, he's caught some outrageously large (yet, I'm told, finite) quantity of fish, and it might end up being all we eat until I go back to the States (this is my speculation). The problem is, I absolutely refuse to eat seafood. It offends my senses.

Royale with Cheese

Whoa, Europe is amazing - I'm at a combination casino and internet café! Isn't that something. There are actually people here - who the hell gambles at ten in the morning?

I've gotten behind - more posts coming soon, and they won't be in chronological order, so look under the toppost. Stuff that happened yesterday, for instance, will be posted as June 1 and will appear under this post, despite being new.

Hannover

Today we went to a bigass bookstore in Hannover; it was something like four or five floors, plus a café. I did a damn near forensic analysis of the place; although the selection was excellent (they had multiple copies of the Cryptonomicon!), I couldn't find anything by Ayn Rand. (That goes for amazon.de as well - if gold rust, what then will iron do?) No wonder there's so much socialism here.

I got two books, myself. I didn't want to spend too much money (I'm saving it for a Prague bookstore, my money will go further anyway) and I only wanted to buy things in the original German. I got a book called Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod. It's essentially the German counterpart of Eats Shoots and Leaves; that is, it talks about the quirks of the "labyrinth of the German language." Der, die, das - warum, wieso, weshalb? The other book is by Andreas von Bülow, the former German defense minister; it's about the CIA's role in the September 11th attacks. Mr. Bülow has been interviewed twice now on the Alex Jones show, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to buy this book.

There was a lot of interesting stuff there; they had a seventeen volume history of Germany, for instance. I looked in their Travel section ("Reise"); a Lonely Planet guidebook to Prague (in English!) listed a bunch of bookstores, two of which are (a) absolutely gigantic, (b) located in Wenceslas Square, and (c) replete with Czech-language books. I'll probably walk into the first one I can find and spend about ten thousand dollars.

Work! (I will not reference the Seven Dwarves song)

So I woke up fine this morning. As always, my immune system means business. My sudden return to health enabled me to go to work, and there was much rejoicing.

It actually wasn't that interesting. I met the head partner or the president or the chairman or whatever the hell he is - it doesn't matter, he's best friends with Armin. He took me into a conference room, asked me a few obligatory questions, spoke very quietly the whole time. Actually, the entire company mumbles. It reminded me of Conglom-O, with the guys tip-toeing around on the ceiling and along the walls. He brought in two women and they looked at my resumé, apparently for the first time, and talked about what to do with me. They eventually decided to put me on something called Crystal Reports, informed me that I'd start next Tuesday, and then Bigwig showed me around and introduced me to the entire company. The first three people in a row all asked immediately how long I'd be working here. I'm not sure what to make of that, but eventually Bigwig made it a part of his boilerplate introduction, so I can't say for sure whether everyone in that company was a scripted NPC.

That's really all there is to tell; more developments as they happen.

FEVER

"Woke up" (I slept three hours) with a 102° or thereabouts FEVER today. Couldn't go into work today by any means. Not good. Watched Pulp Fiction and Pi (twice) with the commentary tracks by Sean Gullette and Darren Aronofsky. And Spongebob Squarepants! Imagine - three hours of sleep, fever, I turn on the TV and Spongebob Squarepants comes on in German - THAT will make you question reality. German, by the way, is not a pithy language, and the German voice actors who do the dubs have to talk exceptionally fast. More surrealism.